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Tips for Guiding Your Child to Build a Healthy Self-Concept

Healthy self-concept is only developed when children encounter struggles in the real world, learn how to overcome these struggles, and then see themselves acting in respectful and responsible ways. Stated quite simply, self-concept is an inside job.

Because of its undisputed importance, people have spent tremendous energy trying different approaches to give kids a healthy self-concept. In fact, psychologists place a huge emphasis on the importance of having a positive self-concept and rightly so! How we feel about ourselves may be the single most important factor affecting how motivated we are to succeed in school, the types of friends we select, the person we marry, and our general well-being throughout our lives.

Here are some examples of Self-Concept Builders and comparable Self-Concept Stealers:

Builder:  Focus on children’s strengths.

Stealer:  Focus on children’s weaknesses.

Builder:  Expect children to work for most of the things they want.

Stealer:  Give children everything they want.

Builder:  Set loving limits and expect children respect them.

Stealer:  Be afraid to set limits.

Builder:  Show children that arguing and manipulation don’t work.

Stealer:  Get pulled into arguments and power struggles.

Builder:  Guide children to own and solve the problems that they create.

Stealer:  Rescue or punish children when they create problems.

Builder:  Avoid lectures and repeated warnings.

Stealer:  Use lectures and repeated warnings often.

Parenting style is a critical component of helping kids develop a healthy self-concept. Even though Helicopter Parents (parents who constantly rescue and protect their children) and Drill Sergeant Parents (parents who constantly order and control their children) appear to have dramatically different parenting styles, they both rob children of opportunities to learn from real-world experience. Either they are rescuing them from those opportunities, or they are controlling their response to those opportunities.

Consultant Parents (Love and Logic Parents), on the other hand, help their kids develop a healthy self-concept by guiding and allowing their children to encounter and learn from struggles in the real world. In other words, they use Self-Concept Builders instead of stealers.